Stained Glass Designs by Walter Crane

Crane’s own account of his stained glass

MY ﬁrst designs for stained glass, I think, were some
small panels for a library window in an American house,
at Newport, RI. These were executed by Messrs. William
Morris and Company, at Merton. The same ﬁrm also
carried out two designs I made for the doors of the
Picture Gallery at Clare Lawn—single ﬁgures, typical of
the two sides of Art—Speculum Naturae and Spherae
ImaginatiOnis. A larger work was a three-light window,
designed for a Church at Newark, New Jersey, and
carried out by Messrs. J. and R. Lamb, of New York.
The subject was “St. Paul preaching at Athens,” and the
ﬁgures were on a large scale—about ten or twelve feet
high.

The Translation of Elijah. Church of the Ark of the Covenant, Stamford Hill.

The next work in glass was a complete set of windows
for “The Ark of the Covenant”—the Church of the
Agapemone—at Stamford Hill. It was a new church,
designed and erected by Messrs. Joseph Morris and Son,
of Reading. My designs for the apse window, or rather
the three two-light windows forming the apse, contained
in the centre the symbols—the Lion of the Tribe of
Judah and the Dove. In the window to the left,
the subject was the Translation of Enoch; and in that to the
right, the Translation of Elijah.. . .

The two-light aisle windows were ﬁlled with ﬂoral
designs, such as the rose, the lily, the vine, the fig, the
olive, the iris, and were lighter in tone than those at
the east and west ends. The large four-light west window had a design of the rising Sun of Righteousness. The
ﬁgure of a man was on one side, and of a woman upon
the other, adoring ; four angels above carried a scroll with
the text, “Then shall the Sun of Righteousness arise with
healing in his wings.” Smaller (two-light) windows at
the ends of the aisles contained ﬁgures on the one hand
of “Sin and Shame,” and on the other of “Death and
Disease,” which are supposed to be driven away with the
shadows of the evil night at the rising of the Sun of
Righteousness.

The glass for these windows was executed by a new
artist, Mr. J. Sylvester Sparrow, who shows remarkable
feeling for depth and richness of colour, and has made
effective use of Messrs. Britton and Gilson’s glass, invented by Mr. Prior, with the “antique” glass of Messrs.
Powell.

Another large work in glass design now on the point of
completion is a ﬁve-light perpendicular window with
tracery, in which Mr. Sparrow, as the glass painter, again
co-operates with me as the designer and cartoonist. . . . [see at right]
which may give some slight idea of the general style
and treatment of the design, though not of the
glass itself; for glass is one of those things which must be
actually seen in situ to be properly judged.

The lead line is so important an element in glass
design that I feel no cartoon can be considered really
complete without the leads being put in. In fact, I
think the design in lead line alone ought to be fairly
complete and agreeable as an arrangement of line even
without the colour, and as such it may in plain glass have
a separate life, although, of course, the leads and the glass
are really mutually dependent; and in a fully-coloured
window one hardly thinks of'the one without the other. As
to treatment, of course much depends upon general conditions, but I think it may be quite possible in designing to go far in a pictorial direction, so long as the result is in harmony with the architecture, and appeals primarily to the eye as a pattern of lead line and colour—a network of jewelled light.
[18, 20]

Work in other media

References

Crane, Walter. The Work of Walter Crane with Notes by the Artist. The Easter Art Annual for 1898: Extra Number of the “Art Journal”. London: J. S. Virtue, 1898.
Internet Archive version of a copy in the Getty Art Institute. Web. 3 January 2018.